73 pages • 2-hour read
The Correspondent
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Perpetuating Cycles of Grief
In the many overlapping relationships throughout the novel, grief is a common denominator as each character wrestles with the issues that afflict their family. Through Sybil, however, Evans espouses that grief—even when a person attempts to manage it—cannot easily be contained. Intentionally or not, untreated grief often engenders its own perpetuating cycles across any kind of relationship as it twists moral character.
Evans demonstrates this perpetuation specifically through the developing relationship between Sybil and Dezi. Though Sybil may not have held the gavel that brought upon Enzo’s incarceration, she and Dezi nevertheless believe she holds much of the blame. Evans emphasizes that Sybil’s fault lies at the heart of her inaction, as Sybil explains in this passage: “I did not plead on her [Dezi’s mother’s] behalf, as I should have, as I, a mother, should have. I knew I had his [Guy’s] ear, and I did not speak up for your [Dezi’s] mother” (221). More than a matter of unextended sympathy towards another mother, however, the author implies that Sybil’s grief distorted her very sense of self. By all accounts, Sybil is depicted as a character who fell in love with the law not only for its structure but also for its proposed moral code and ideas of justice. Sybil claims she loves order (129), and through Fiona’s angered astonishment at her absence at Daan’s funeral, Sybil is understood as someone who prizes good manners over personal comfort: “I know you [Sybil] don’t travel and I’ve [Fiona] told myself that’s why you haven’t ever come to visit me in London, but with all your principles of propriety, all your tenets on how one ought to be…you attend a funeral!” (142). Much like her absence from Daan’s funeral, therefore, Sybil’s behavior in Enzo’s case and her desire to see his family in similar misery as her own are not only outliers of her behavioral pattern—they stand in direct contradiction to everything that defines her.
Evans underscores this contradiction by showing how grief unravels the very qualities Sybil clings to: discipline, order, civility. Just as her letters to Daan collapse into strikeouts and fragments, her silence at Enzo’s trial betrays the legal rigor and sense of justice she once embodied. While this occurrence of corruption in her personhood might have only been a small chapter in Sybil’s long life, her inability to reckon with her grief created a new cycle of grief, one wherein, through her pettiness and jealousy, Dezi lives through the absence of his father, witnesses him deteriorate upon his release, and experiences his premature death at a young age. In his own grief, Dezi mirrors Sybil: He never truly addresses it and instead turns cruel by stalking Sybil and terrifying her in her old age. His grief breeds a distorted anger that seemingly contradicts the hardworking family man he eventually reveals himself to be. Unlike her, however, he does not feel the satisfaction she felt when Enzo was unfairly committed when he channels his unresolved grief through her. Rather, as he points out, “I hated you for such a long time, but you were just a small old woman and I was lost. I didn’t know what to do so I cut the flowers. This didn’t help” (209). Though the correspondence between both characters is a grueling undertaking of vulnerability and honesty, Evans suggests that cycles of grief are only stopped when a person acknowledges and confronts their pain and feelings. The inheritance Sybil leaves Dezi in her will demonstrates this break in the cycle. Rather than transmitting more pain, she offers material repair, reframing grief into restitution.
The Trials of Parenthood
For many of the central characters in the narrative, family ties are a complicated entanglement of love, frustration, pain, and sacrifice. While circumstances differ from character to character, Evans showcases a common truth held by all of them: Though they may put on airs and shoulder heavy burdens, a parent is still a human with faults and strengths and remains as prone to mistakes as the children they attempt to rear.
Evans encapsulates this quiet truth namely through Sybil and Fiona’s relationship and their individual inability to reconcile with their discordant childhoods. In Sybil’s case, her adoption as a child and neurodivergent-coded mindset left her with a deep-seated fear of abandonment. Rather than being resolved over time, however, this fear grew into a need for a paradoxical exercise in distant connection, which was met and shaped by her letter writing. Sybil credits her biological mother’s only letter to her adoptive parents as the reason behind her lifelong habit, and through it, Evan proposes that the act of writing letters becomes a kind of claimed inheritance. Effectively, it is the only attempt at a bond Sybil can make with her adoptive mother, even though it will always remain unreciprocated. But while the act of letter writing might have brought her closer to her mother, it effectively distanced her from her remaining loved ones. Sybil’s adamant habit of communicating through letters fundamentally addressed the awkwardness she has always felt with speech and social settings, as it provided a comfortable space and time for her to choose her words carefully and adjust them before necessarily expressing them. This method of communication, however, proves a double-edged sword, as she explains in this passage:
When I was young, by writing letters I found a framework that made living easier, and that has never changed. However, I do wonder if by conducting the most intimate relationships of my life in correspondence, I have kept, since I was a child, a distance between myself and others (239).
This distance is expressly felt through her relationship with Fiona, as Sybil has always felt a great amount of anxiety that echoed the one that drove her to write letters in the first place:
With the two boys [Bruce and Gilbert] I [Sybil] felt I was in a position I could manage […] but then you [Fiona] came out, a girl. I was afraid to have a girl because what if I couldn’t understand you? I’d never found a way to fit into the world, not really, and what if I didn’t know how to be a mother to you? (239).
Evans deepens this conflict by contrasting what Sybil feels and what Fiona perceives. Fiona interprets her mother’s absence at Daan’s funeral as a moral failure—proof that propriety matters more to Sybil than love. This disconnect shows how trauma distorts parent-child bonds: Sybil thinks that she is protecting herself and her daughter from further loss, but Fiona experiences only rejection. Sybil’s feelings of ineptitude and her awkward handling of a familial relationship with Fiona here recreate the same kind of distant connection she has with her biological mother. Much like Sybil is unable to access her mother beyond the act of writing, Fiona isn’t able to connect with Sybil because Sybil hides behind her letters and inability to overcome the feelings of abandonment, wrongness, and anxiety she’s had since she was a child. When dealing with her, therefore, Fiona is not simply dealing with a hard-to-understand mother figure; she is also reckoning with her mother’s unresolved childhood trauma. The reconciliation they achieve after Sybil admits her blindness illustrates the possibility of growth. When Sybil finally abandons the safety of letters for unvarnished truth, she begins to bridge the divide that has defined their relationship.
The Stagnation Within Fear
While Gilbert’s accident precedes the narrative, the character nevertheless occupies a central role as he haunts Sybil’s life, her decisions, and the joys she does (and more likely doesn’t) allow herself to have. Yet if Gilbert’s death is an undeniable source of grief for Sybil, Evans insinuates that his accident has also instilled a deep-seated fear in Sybil, one that fundamentally shifted how she interacts with the world around her and has confined her into self-imposed stagnation.
The author signals this arrested development in her main character via Sybil’s reactions to two specific mediums: postcards and fiction novels. In both cases, Sybil often expresses a longing to see and experience cultures and lands she’s never visited before. Through her response to Felix’s postcard from France, however, Sybil demonstrates just how Gilbert’s death has impacted and twisted her relationship with her desires to travel. To his invitation to visit, she tellingly responds as follows:
I would love to see your new house, [but] no, I’ll not come. Just as a summer afternoon is gorgeous from inside air-conditioning, and you step into the day, hot, muggy, miserable, a postcard of France with all the lavender and sunflowers, I imagine, is far more alluring than the place itself (14).
As in many of her correspondences, Sybil proves herself to be an unreliable narrator in this passage, and her so-called preference for experiencing France through the intermediary of a postcard is nothing but a show of smoke and mirrors. As is revealed near the end of the narrative, Sybil illogically associated Gilbert’s death with the act of travelling internationally and reasoned that if she did travel abroad, an unnamed and unforeseeable tragedy would occur. Her excuses—complaints about security, regulations, and inconvenience—mask a superstition: that leaving home will invite catastrophe. Evans shows how fear masquerades as practicality.
As a result, Sybil has confined herself to a localized and domestic living arrangement, cultivating a slew of excuses and arguments to substantiate her avoidance of international travel: “It’s such a hassle to fly these days with the security and all the regulations […]. Honestly, it doesn’t appeal to me [Sybil] in the least” (14). Yet, given her family situation, her avoidance comes at a cost. Fiona, after all, lives in both Australia and the United Kingdom throughout the narrative, and it is a heavy point of criticism against her mother and their strained relationship that Sybil never makes an effort to visit but complains recurrently about never seeing Fiona. Evans, however, reinforces that it is not a lack of desire that keeps Sybil from travelling, as she heavily infers in Sybil’s letters to authors about their books: “During the course of ready both books [The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro], I felt an urgent desire to visit England (which I will never do […])” (92). Because of her fear of potential tragedies abroad, Sybil forcefully keeps herself from experiencing the foreign world through simulacrum, curbing her desires and interests as she simply cannot move past the tragedy of her son’s death. The late turn in which she finally travels to London and Scotland with Theodore and Hattie transforms this theme: Once she faces fear directly, she discovers renewal. Evans thus suggests that fear may halt life for decades, but it can also be undone in a single act of courage.
Unlock every key theme and why it matters
Get in-depth breakdowns of the book’s main ideas and how they connect and evolve.
- Explore how themes develop throughout the text
- Connect themes to characters, events, and symbols
- Support essays and discussions with thematic evidence